Gunpowder, The Crown, Stranger Things and Peaky Blinders. Here's the best TV coming your way in 2017.

It was admirable of Gary to look beyond the ranters of the so-called ‘alt-Right’ movement and search for reasons why so many voted for Trump.

It would have been easy to dismiss them all as “a basket of deplorables”, as Hillary Clinton did, causing deprived Democrat-voting areas like Johnstown, Pennsylvania to go over en masse to Trump.

With the exception of alt-Right leader Richard Spencer, who saw himself as the intellectual face of the movement and was plainly very stupid, nobody interviewed seemed that deplorable or particularly dim.

That made it all the harder to believe they could be duped or hijacked into signing up for a set of values they didn’t really support.

It was similar to those commentators over here who claim that people were just tricked into voting for Brexit.

It plainly wasn’t that simple, because people aren’t either.

ITV

Police Tapes – The Murder of Becky Watts

Police Tapes – The Murder of Becky Watts (ITV) left us with similar feelings.

With access to the police footage of arrests and interviews in this shocking 2016 case, viewers received a masterclass in the methods of detection.

It had, of course, less to do with sudden brainwaves and more with patiently building a list of doubts, alarm bells and points of interest into a solid case.

Detectives investigating the disappearance of teenager Becky Watts homed in on her stepbrother, Nathan Charles, and his girlfriend Shauna Hoare.

ITV

Viewers received a masterclass in the methods of detection

They seemed too light-hearted in the initial interviews and their accounts matched each other’s so perfectly that the investigators suspected a cover-up.

It didn’t take much imagination to focus on the tensions between stepbrothers and stepsisters, particularly sullen stepbrothers and stepsisters who, by all accounts, lit up the room.

The thing about detectives, though, is that they don’t use their imaginations.

They follow up every angle and in this case, they found a far darker story involving Nathan, Shauna and a twisted, sexually motivated plan to abduct a girl.

What had made them like that? Why did Nathan’s mother say she thought her son had intended to kill Becky?

The police tapes didn’t go there, mainly because they didn’t have to and maybe, because there was no hope of knowing.